Weather program left out in the cold

摘要

It's not every day the U.S. Air Force wants to throw away a perfectly good satellite. But that's what's happening with DMSP-20, a $500 million spacecraft built under the longstanding Defense Meteorological Satellite Program. World history may have taken a different path without accurate weather information ahead of the Allied invasion of Normandy. Had Gen. Eisenhower ignored his meteorologist's advice to postpone the invasion one day, experts theorize, heavy seas and high winds would have caused the operation to fail. Asked after the war why the Normandy invasion had been so successful, then-President Eisenhower said,"Because we had better meteorologists than the Germans!"